Haley Lu Richardson has been following what sounds like a standard, but is admittedly a very lucky, young actor’s path for the past six years.

Small parts in TV movies, recurring series roles (“Ravenswood,” “Recovery Road”), a flurry of indies that showcased her versatility — post-apocalyptic desert teen in “The Last Survivors,” student with issues in “The Young Kieslowski,” comic gymnast in “The Bronze” — and noticeable supporting turns in acclaimed, bigger movies such as “The Edge of Seventeen” and “Split.”

Now the 23-year-old, onetime competitive dancer from Phoenix is co-starring in an art film. But not just any art film. “Columbus” is an immersive dive into creative work itself — in this case, the many modern architecture marvels that dot the small Indiana city of the title — and what it means to the soul of the restless local woman Richardson portrays.

“It’s really rare, in the few years that I’ve been doing this professionally and actually getting work, to like a script and the people who are working on it, and then the experience is like, the best thing in the world,” Richardson enthuses about “Columbus,” which marks the feature film debut of South Korea-born, Midwest-raised writer-director Kogonada, who’s earned widespread praise for his video essays on great films and filmmakers.

“I learned so much from doing this movie,” Richardson continues. “I just tried to absorb everything because I never went to film school, I never studied cinema in any way, and Kogonada is such a cinephile. He appreciates it and dissects it as if it were truly an art and not just this business. So everything he did with the visuals of this place Columbus and of these buildings, why each scene was filmed in each place, everything was very purposeful and very symbolic.”

In the movie, Richardson’s Casey is deeply moved and informed about her (and, fun fact, our current vice-president’s) hometown’s mid-20th century masterpieces by the likes of Eero Saarinen, I. M. Pei, Robert Venturi and many others. When a noted Korean architecture scholar collapses in the city, his estranged son Jin (“Star Trek” and “Harold & Kumar’s” John Cho) comes to town to wait out his father’s hospitalization.

Casey, who when not leading tours of the buildings works at the modernist (of course) town library, spots Jin around and strikes up an acquaintance. Though he’s not into architecture like his dad, he’s very smart about it, and Casey is clearly, intellectually at least, smitten. She longs to leave Columbus and study architecture formally but is reluctant to leave her single mom, Maria (Michelle Forbes), a recovering meth addict, alone. Jin simply can’t wait to get out of the place, but a deeply ingrained sense of filial responsibility nags at him too. The two of them bond from all sorts of angles, like the asymmetrical structures Kogonada and cinematographer Elisha Christian ever so carefully frame them against and compose them within.

Despite all that foregrounded aestheticism, Richardson sees “Columbus” as a highly relatable story about just folks.

“Kogonada’s script was like a breath of fresh air for me,” she says. “Just how simple and still and human this movie was, I feel like saying it’s so extraordinary because they’re such ordinary people. It reminds you that every single person you see crossing the street, if you could somehow dive into their life, you could figure out all these interesting worlds they live in. In the simplest way, ‘Columbus’ kind of wakes you up to humanity.

That isn’t surprising, really, when you consider that the director’s assumed single name is a cinephilic inside joke related to the master of capturing the transcendent everyday, Japan’s Yasujiro Ozu. And along with the crash courses in architecture and cinema, Kogonada taught Richardson a few things about acting that she knows will serve her well.

“It was a very structured movie in, like, a soulful way,” she recalls. “What he always talked about on set was finding the soul in these clean, modernist, sometimes a little bit cold buildings, and that’s what John and I were to represent in every scene.

“As a person, I’m very expressive, especially with my body,” Richardson reveals. “I move a lot, I move my hands when I talk, I jump around, I fidget with things. Kogonada and I worked a lot together about being still, in my face and my body. We were in a space, and filling that somehow had to match the tone of the buildings.”

While both of Richardson’s parents are graphic designers, and her father even does golf course architecture, little Haley Lu was mainly an irrepressible dance nerd.

“I always wanted to perform somehow,” she recalls. “I was just a ham when I was a kid. Any of my cousins will tell you they all hated me because I took all the attention — like, very forcefully — at every Christmas dinner. I did musical theater in Arizona, which I just had a blast with even though I suck at singing. But then I did competitive dance for a really long time.”

After winning some contests, 16-year-old Haley Lu persuaded her mom to move with her to L.A., where she quickly landed dancing gigs in commercials, video games and TV shows. Acting jobs just flowed naturally from that, and while it all seems like an unusually normal career path in a business notorious for rarely working out that way, Richardson isn’t taking any of it for granted.

“I worked and made a little bit of money that first year, but I also got to be on sets and see how they worked,” she recalls. “I got to experience that without the pressure of acting when I really didn’t know how and wasn’t ready to do that professionally.

“It was definitely lucky, but it was also a lot of hard work. Y’know, it feels like it’s been a really long time because of all the rejection and other hard things I’ve been through. But when I look back and realize that it’s only been about six years, I do feel lucky and that I must have been in the right places at the right time a few times.”

And now, with, “Columbus,” a complete character in a true, unapologetic work of art — and not all that unlike the Haley Lu Richardson story.

“To be so still and so vulnerable at times and all of these things,” Richardson notes, “I just feel like this was the first time that anyone’s ever let me tell a whole story of a girl who’s not important in the grand scheme of the world, but her story is so important to her and to her mom, to her town and her future. It was challenging to do that justice, but that’s what I love about it.”

Bob Strauss has been covering film at the L.A. Daily News since 1989. He wouldn't say the movies have gotten worse in that time, but they do keep getting harder to love. Fortunately, he still loves them.